Picture this: you are cramming for a test the night before. You are stuck on a question, so you look to Google for answers, which then redirects you to a Quizlet, which has all the help you need.

“Yay! Quizlet always has what I need,” you think to yourself, which would be true in previous years, but not anymore.

To your horror, you see a big lock covering the contents of the Quizlet, saying users need to upgrade to Quizlet Plus

in order to view the answers.

In December of 2018, Quizlet came out with its premium content, which featured expert-curated study guides and materials. But, all of the important study features, such as Learn mode and other games remained free for users.

Earlier this year, Quizlet revamped its features for the paid version, which now limits a lot of the features that were once free to users. Reviewing flashcards and playing the Match game are the only tools users can use without cost.

If you want to view other users’ Quizlets, most of them are locked. You also cannot use the advanced features that were once available. These were crucial for students, as the technology would help them study what they needed to based on the data that the website collected.

As of 2018, there were 50 million monthly users of Quizlet across the world, according to Forbes. So as a result of a rise in popularity, many features were improved while others were limited to paid members only.

Quizlet is a business and this is a great marketing strategy on their part. However, it is now difficult for many students to find good resources to help them out with school.

Quizlet helped students learn the material they needed to know in many different ways, whether that was by the flashcards and revising features or viewing other people’s Quizlets to get different perspectives.

On the website, Quizlet has released a statement stating that Quizlet is a small team of people and that the number of students and teachers using it has been exponentially growing. Therefore, they’ve made these changes to better reinvest in building great products that can help millions of students around the world.

While this change may have its benefits, Quizlet will most likely also lose a lot of users due to the new terms, and more students will face difficulties in finding new study methods.